Two satellites will analyze the rise in sea level

BarcelonaThe European Union's Copernicus Earth observation program is launching a second satellite for its Sentinel-6 mission this Monday to collect data on ocean temperatures, particularly those of the Mediterranean Sea, which is warming twice as fast as the global average. The new satellite, named Sentinel-6B, incorporates a sensor that measures, among other things, sea level rise, one of the consequences of the climate crisis caused by warming waters and the melting of the polar ice caps, which is now considered irreversible. This instrument is the Poseidon-4 radar altimeter, which is also present on its predecessor, Sentinel-6A, launched in November 2020, but will add precision to the collected data. The new launch will take place from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (United States). "Thanks to the development of new data processing algorithms, we have increasingly precise information about sea level, which helps us better understand how climate change affects us," explains Mònica Roca i Aparici, former president of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and current CEO of IsardSat, the Catalan space technology company that designed the system to process the data received from these two satellites. This satellite will also help to better observe and predict extreme weather events and flooding—especially on the coast—resulting from global warming. The Copernicus oceanographic mission provides essential, high-precision data for monitoring the impacts of the climate emergency on the sea. Satellite monitoring of this variable began in 1991 with the ERS-1 mission (1991-2000) and continued with several more missions. Multiple satellites monitor various ocean characteristics, and Sentinel-6 is specifically responsible for measuring sea level.

Both are the result of a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Commission through the Copernicus program, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Their data are publicly available, and the mission is scheduled to continue until (at least) 2030.

This data has shown that since 1999, sea levels worldwide have risen by 9.38 cm (an average of 3.7 mm/year), and in the last ten years, this rate has accelerated (1999–2009) to 4.2 mm/year (2014–2024).